For those wondering how Ken Buck hopes to blunt the low-hanging-fruit attacks being hurled at him, the POLITICO’s David Catanese and Jonathan Martin offers a report this morning that says Buck plans to just answer the questions.

“The only way for me to get my message out and for people to understand who Ken Buck is and that I’m not the person being portrayed by [Democratic National Committee Chairman] Tim Kaine or Michael Bennet is for me to be very open. And I will answer every question,” he said.

“Does it look like I’m afraid of you?” Buck added, chuckling.

Buck takes on the unfair charges of sexism, but also tries to account for more legitimate questions being raised about campaign-trail statements regarding his views of Social Security.

His campaign believes the election will be a referendum on spending — an issue that will place Bennet on the defensive for his support for the $787 billion dollar stimulus — a health care reform law that a majority of Coloradans say they want repealed, and Democratic plans for “cap-and-trade” energy legislation to control carbon emissions.

Ultimately, his advisers say, Buck will overcome what they say are Democratic efforts to caricature him by putting the candidate’s intelligence and personality on frequently display. In Nevada and Kentucky, both Angle and Paul have hunkered down — making themselves less accessible to reporters.

Buck consultant Walt Klein said the candidate’s candor and sense of humor are what drew voters to him in the early months of the campaign. “He doesn’t hedge. He tries to answer the question. That’s the fundamental connection he’s made with voters,” Klein said.

Yes, the POLITICO background on Buck will be familiar to Colorado readers who have kept up with The Denver Post’s Allison Sherry’s reporting. But Buck’s comments about the Tea Party, Rand Paul and Sharron Angle are clearly worth a look.

UPDATE 7:26 a.m., Aug. 7 | In an editorial titled “Jury still out on risky DPS loan,” we note that The Post’s editorial board supported Bennet’s loan package, though we acknowledged it was risky. We also call claims by some Bennet opponents that he structured the deal to curry favor with Wall Street executives who know support his campaign “a baseless smear.”

UPDATE 1:19 a.m., Aug. 7 | The Denver Post has published a follow-up piece with additional details to Friday morning’s New York Times article.

Placed on its front page, and above the fold, the story, headlined “Exotic Deals Put Denver Schools Deeper in Debt,” will answer the question for many Colorado observers of whether a massive loan Bennet championed while superintendent at DPS was such a good idea.

For a politician down in the polls and already playing pushback against Andrew Romanoff’s vicious “Greed” ad, The Times’ before-the-jump summations of the DPS debt issuance must feel like body blows.

The Denver schools essentially made the same choice some homeowners make: opting for a variable-rate mortgage that offered lower monthly payments, with the risk that they could rise, instead of a conventional, fixed-rate mortgage that offered larger, but unchanging, monthly payments.

The Denver school board unanimously approved the JPMorgan deal and it closed in April 2008, just weeks after a major investment bank, Bear Stearns, failed. In short order, the transaction went awry because of stress in the credit markets, problems with the bond insurer and plummeting interest rates.

Since it struck the deal, the school system has paid $115 million in interest and other fees, at least $25 million more than it originally anticipated.

To avoid mounting expenses, the Denver schools are looking to renegotiate the deal. But to unwind it all, the schools would have to pay the banks $81 million in termination fees, or about 19 percent of its $420 million payroll.

John MacPherson, a former interim executive director of the Denver Public Schools Retirement System, predicts that the 2008 deal will generate big costs to the school system down the road. “There is no happy ending to this,” Mr. MacPherson said. “Hindsight being 20-20, the pension certificates issuance is something that should never have happened.”

Progressive writer and talk show personality extraordinaire David Sirota has seized the story and was already sending out e-mail alerts last night that connected the dots in ways Team Bennet is not going to appreciate.

Bennet has spent $1.9 million on advertising to Romanoff’s roughly $757,000, both campaigns said. Romanoff’s total spending so far is $1.7 million, compared with Bennet’s nearly $5.8 million.

Now, $4,100,000 is not just a lot of money. That’s a LOT of money.

Some perspective: The $4.1 million more Bennet has spent merely to struggle to stay even with Romanoff is $900,000 more than the total Democratic contenders Mike Miles and Ken Salazar spent in 2004 – combined.

Your Spotted This Morning correspondent admits great surprise (even though the reports on the overspending have been piling up for months now, it’s still shocking to see the tally), and wonders whether the erstwhile underdog could maintain his momentum in the general election, should he pull this off.

As the POLITICO’s David Cantainese notes, a key Romanoff campaign strategy has been to eschew donations from Political Action Committees. And while the campaign continues to stress that’s the plan, it doesn’t appear as stringent toward some outside assistance as it might have in the past.

Not only does Rolly Fischer’s account to KMGH Channel 7 make it appear that Scott McInnis is fully responsible for the significant plagiarism within McInnis’ “Musings on Water,” articles – Fischer has what he says is a letter from Team McPlagiarist that looks devastating.

The letter Fischer says the campaign tried to get him to sign would have made make it look like the researcher took full responsibility for the plagiarism.

Dear Scott:

I am writing to express my sincere apology for failing to provide appropriate attribution for the research I provided for the water articles we collaborated on. While my mistake was not intentional, it is nonetheless clear that this material needed footnotes.

This mistake was solely my own and I recognize that my work fell short of the expectations you had when you included me in this project.

Meanwhile, the researcher, he claims, was kept in the dark on the purpose of his research. Further, Fischer says he didn’t know that McInnis was getting paid serious coin for the articles his work went on to create. Fischer says he was paid a few hundred dollars for each article he researched. McInnis was paid $300,000.

Team McInnis Spokesman Sean Duffy told The Denver Post last night that something was wrong with Fischer’s comments to Channel 7.

Revelations of extensive plagiarism in work that gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis claimed as his own call into question his fitness for public office.

The lifted work, examined in The Denver Post, constitutes inexcusable intellectual thievery. It is so damaging that we believe McInnis ought to drop out of the race.

Several facts about McInnis toppled his house of cards in our eyes. This week’s revelations of plagiarism by The Denver Post’s Karen E. Crummy, joined with several past missteps – such as giving his wife nearly $40,000 from campaign funds to run a nonexistent campaign – provided plenty of cause for the admittedly serious request.

Meanwhile, McInnis’ erratic and contradictory responses yesterday with 9News’ Adam Schrager presented further evidence about the obvious risks of installing the former congressman in the state’s highest office. Because it certainly seemed to us that McInnis kept things muddled. In one sputtering statement, he claimed responsibility; in the next, the research assistant got it wrong; it yet another, McInnis claimed he should have used a different kind of software.

Even diehard supporters of the former congressman are going to have a tough time with this one.

The fact that the Hasans are suggesting they want their $300,000 back, and calling plagiarism the portions of text highlighted by The Denver Post’s Karen E. Crummy, seems to close the debate on whether any wrongdoing took place.

Your Spotted This Morning correspondent wonders what readers make of it. Because it would seem McInnis has few options.

Here’s why. As a paid writer with lots of paid writer friends, I don’t know anyone who would excuse someone for plagiarism. It’s a breach of the highest order.

I don’t know any writer who would be so sloppy that they would allow an assistant to cheat on their behalf.

I don’t know of any writer who would pretend he or she did all the work on a text if a research assistant had been employed. You ALWAYS include attribution or credit sources and co-writers.

Yes, there are books written by “ghost writers.” But this was meant to be an academic text authored by someone with expertise, so the Hollywood rules of ghost writing would hardly be appropriate.

In my industry, an abuse like this one means you clean out your desk and go begging.

Ben Marter, Betsy Markey’s communication director, is officially the most famous political flak in the Colorado delegation – all on the strength of his recipe for spicy chicken stir-fry. Seriously.

Marter was profiled earlier this week on the Politico website under the headline “Ben Marter’s Home Cooked Weekend.” Turns out, Politico was enamored with his kitchen skills, noting:

On Friday night, at home with his girlfriend, Marter cooked up a spicy chicken stir-fry with broccoli, cabbage, mushrooms, green beans, peanuts and onions, and seasoned with with ginger and lemongrass.

“I recommend it,” he said.

Saturday morning, he took some of the leftover broccoli, onions and mushrooms, added jalapenos, and made omlettes for a zingy breakfast.

But the piece on Marter’s cooking exploits may say less about him and more about the state political journalism in Washington. To wit:

The Politico piece was picked up and referred to as “journo art” by gawker.com. That was followed in short order by Vanity Fair, which called it “yesterday afternoon’s most important piece of political journalism .”

Yes, that Polis was having some fun with the interview in this context is simply what’s expected. “Shenanigans,” as the name implies, is the gossipy fun side of POLITICO, and the feature is not to be taken seriously.

But I just love this moment.

If you had to describe your life as a movie, what movie would it be?

“Star Wars.” Oh wait, that’s just my favorite movie. It would be fun to say “The Manchurian Candidate” to get everyone worried, but I’d have to go with “Being There.”

“Being There” is a comedy featuring the late, great Peter Sellers in the role of a simple gardener named Chance. Chance has never left the estate on which he works as the film opens. He knows nothing of the world other than his life tending to the estate.

“Upon his benefactor’s death the isolated gardener is thrust into the cruel world and by acts of fate he becomes a prominent and important celebrity,” says the Internet Movie Database. “His opinions are sought after yet he is oblivious to anything important.”

I like the film because Sellers brings a dignity to the role that makes the fact that people seek him out believable. Though the things he says are simple, the way he says them comes across as inspired.

For Polis – who has lived a charmed life indeed – to cast himself in the role of Chance Gardener is a fun moment.

Later in the interview, Polis is asked what nickname he would like to have.

His answer is lame: “’Yes, I’d be happy to donate a thousand dollars to your campaign.’ I would love for people to call me that!”

Earlier this week I argued Republicans, who have for months seemed leaderless and fixated on candidates like Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, were blowing the opportunity they’ve been given by eroding poll figures for Barack Obama and his party in general.

But now we see names like Gen. David Petraeus and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough are attracting attention among party heavyweights.

“Several GOP candidates are coming to the view that the way to run against Obama is not to out-Obama Obama with flash or sizzle,” Dan Senor, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Bush administration veteran, told POLITICO. “They want to go in the opposite direction: smart, back-to-basics, competence.”

Who would’ve thought the GOP would have energy and enthusiasm this early?

As the POLITICO story puts it: “The common denominator is that Republican operatives no longer assume — as they did in the opening months of Obama’s presidency — that 2012 will be a fruitless cycle for their party. The comparisons to 1964, a nadir for the GOP, are now being reassessed.

“Liz Cheney, a State Department official in the Bush administration, said it is ‘absolutely’ possible for a Republican to win the presidency in 2012.”

Anyway, whether they do have a real shot in 2012 remains a huge question. But for those of us who like a strong two-party system, it’s nice to see conservatives looking beyond Palin and talking about folks with more substance.

Update: Alan Salazar, a senior advisor for Sen. Mark Udall, e-mailed this weekend to say that while Udall did not take place in the recent band of 14 moderate Democrats and two Independents who are trying to rein in Barack Obama’s spending, the Colorado Democrat has been a member of the group since some in the Senate worked to carve down the $787 million bill meant to stimulate the economy. Salazar said Udall was unable to attend this week’s meeting of the caucus.

We remember that Udall was part of that process all those weeks ago, so I’ll take the Senator’s advisor at his word that Udall meant to attend the most recent “skull-session.” Meanwhile, we’ll have to be on the lookout this coming week to see how Udall votes on the leftover $410 billion Bush administration budget that served as the subject for the Politico story mentioned below.

When Ken Salazar was in the Senate, he was well known and respected as a moderate who worked across the aisle to settle differences and build useful coalitions, such as his days with the Gang of 14.

All during the run-up to the Democratic National Convention held in Denver last August, Colorado politicians made a great deal out of how moderate and different our kind of Democrats were. Western Democrats, they said, were pragmatic, disciplined people willing to work across the aisle for the good of the country.

So it is interesting to read a report in the Politico today that describes an effort by a group of moderate and conservative Democrats in the Senate that has formed a caucus meant to deal with reining in, as they characterize it, a more liberal Barack Obama than they had expected.

Interesting, I mean to say, because our freshmen Colorado senators, Mark Udall and Michael Bennet aren’t on the list of 14 Democrats and an Independent mentioned in the article.

As the Politico story points out, there is a growing unease with the huge amounts of money going into Obama’s budget. And though there are plenty of Democrats in the House to push through the new president’s agenda, the needed 60 votes in the Senate are more difficult to come by.

“We want to give the president a chance, but our concern is going to be on the budget, looking forward,” Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., told the Politico, adding, “we do have to keep our eye on the long term, on intermediate and long-term fiscal responsibility.”

As NYT columnist David Brooks observed a month ago, moderates in the Senate could become powerful figures while the Senate calculus remains as is.

Udall ran his campaign as a Salazar. But Obama’s budget offers Udall some of the things that are dearest to his heart, such as the cap-and-trade tax meant to help create a new energy economy. So it is difficult to see Udall crossing the president now.

And Bennet, who replaced Salazar, has to run in but two years to keep his seat. It is likewise unlikely to imagine that he can risk alienating the enormously popular president, who could help with the election bid. (Or the farther left in Colorado who might put up a primary challenger if they see the slightest sign that Bennet isn’t fully on board with the president’s agenda.)

But what of Colorado’s Independent-minded voters? If we don’t see Udall and Bennet following Salazar’s example, it will mean they’re counting on a Colorado that remains as blue as it voted in November, and not the more purplish preferences it displayed in the past.

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.